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Development Log 6 – the Tactician and the Sage

Where the Mercenary and Healer are fairly standard RPG skill sets and fill obvious roles, the Tactician and the Sage jobs are a bit more unique. They both focus on more indirect skills and are meant to provide secondary support – either as extra party members or a second or third job. That’s not to say you can’t have them as main party members but that’s probably for more advanced players or those looking for a challenge.

The Tactician learns skills that improve their teammates, helping them act better in combat and in the world. Let’s look at their skills:

Rally – An action that cause a single ally’s readiness meter to charge, letting them act sooner

Leadership – An aura that improves the party’s effectiveness in battle, increasing everyone’s reaction time

Tactical Readiness or Inspiring Speech – An upgrade to Rally so it either affects the Hero too (reducing their recovery) or an upgrade to Rally the make the target act immediately

Offensive Tactics or Defensive Tactics – An upgrade to the Leadership aura that give either offensive or defensive bonuses in addition to improved reaction time

Logistics – A passive skill that increases movement on the world map

Charge! – An action that makes every party member make an melee attack at the same time

You can see the focus isn’t so much on direct damage or healing as much as the Tactician focuses on improving the effectiveness of other party members. These skills make a good addition to any team but still give the Tactician some nice direct actions especially when they learn Charge!

The Sage learns skills that help their teammates learn, but can also learn to use skills by studying monsters. Now let’s look at the Sage’s skills:

Research Target – This action is a bit different, the Sage can use this skill and has a chance to learn a monster’s ability. However they can only learn one ability at a time (and can choose to Research another monster to learn a new skill). The skill learned will depend on the monster that was researched.

Teacher or Scholar – Choice between the boosting party EXP with the Teacher skill or a boost to the Sage’s EXP rate with the Scholar skill.

Examine Target – Same as Research Target, this skill provides another potential monster skill slot.

Knowledge is Power – An Aura that provides a boost to party stats

The Sage’s skills are even less direct than the Tactician’s skills, they help your heroes gain levels faster or let your adapt by learning monster skills. Monster skills are interesting but possibly not immediately useful. If you’re fighting a Fire Elemental you’d be able to learn fire based skills from them, however those skill won’t be very useful against a fire-based enemy. This makes the Sage’s skill more of a long-term investment than other jobs we’ve looked at so far.

These last two update have meant to give just a taste of variety that the new jobs system can add to Heroes of a Broken Land 2. There are dozens of other jobs planned – many of which are sill somewhat undefined. My goal is to ensure that each different jobs bring a unique set of hero skills. More importantly they should each bring a unique approach to tactics and each job should expand on player options while ensuring that no single job is so important that each hero ends up selecting it.

Hopefully a look at the Mercenary, Healer, Tactician and Sage jobs gives a sense of the variety that I hope to achieve with HOBL2’s job system. These are only 4 of the 30+ planned jobs available in the full game. The number of combinations of different jobs should really increase hero variety and help make for interesting choices when building parties.